Abstract [en]

One purpose of budgeting is to allocate financial responsibility within organizations and can be a valuable management tool (Kullvén, 2009). A discussion of long duration, however, is that traditional budgeting should be complemented by other management tools. There is also an advocate for organizations to abandon traditional budgeting and instead work in accordance with the Beyond Budgeting (Neely, Bourne & Adams, 2003).

The purpose of this study is to highlight the advantages and disadvantages of classical Budgeting and Beyond Budgeting. The study was conducted in five listed organizations where interviews were conducted with key personnel.

The study's research questions are:

How do listed companies work with budget, regarding planning, management and evaluation? How does listed companies relate to criticism against the traditional budget?

Four of the five organizations that participated in the study use budgets. They consider that the criticism of the budget is not relevant to their business. All four companies use budgets or forecasts as they prefer to call it, as a tool for planning, management and monitoring. In other words, all four companies follow the classic basic idea of budgeting. None of these four companies have been thinking about abandoning budgeting, but instead works to develop and streamline its budgeting work and adapting budgeting to its own operations and to the world around us changes.

The fifth organization which is working with Beyond Budgeting, believes that the people working close to the customers know the market best and should make the decisions. The organization believes that budgeting is not in accordance with their values. This is because they want to have a flat organization with a minimum of control. Furthermore, the organization working with Beyond Budgeting means that each employee is aware of the need of economizing and does not want to get as much of the "budget pie" as possible.